Mikel Arteta has revealed that Martin Odegaard has been dealing with an injury after dropping him for the Sheffield United win.
The Gunners ran riot at the Emirates Stadium on Saturday, smashing five past the Blades and putting them just two points behind their North London rivals.
Arteta decided to make five changes to the team that won in Seville on Tuesday.
The most controversial decision was to drop captain Odegaard, after a run of poor games from the Norwegian.
Some fans have been calling for the midfielder to be benched and the Spanish manager made the decision to bring in Kai Havertz in his place.
Speaking after the game, Arteta revealed that Odegaard has been playing through an injury and believed that this was the ‘right day’ to rest him.
“We went through all the minutes that everybody has played the last three weeks and some of them played an enormous amount of minutes,” he said via Football.London.
“Martin has been as well carrying a little thing that wasn’t very comfortable in the games.
“So we have players with enormous quality and we have to choose and we believe that it was the right day to do so.”
I believe he got injured when playing international games for Norway. There was incident in one of the games which caused him problems.